Reflection about A. Horowitz's "Amature Eyes"

Alexandra Horowitz, in her book “Amature Eyes”, wrote about the way most people lack the ability to really pay attention. We lack the capacity, or the want, to really see everything, even when we feel we are being more attent than usual. “We are not blinded, but we have blinders.”(Horowitz, 9). The excerpt I read was the introduction to her book, where she analyzed the perspective of various different people walking around various types of blocks. 

One of the key points she makes in this excerpt is that no body knows what paying attention really is. There are people who have studied it but these people only recorded how it feels, and did not really offer a definitive answer on how to do it. “In researching what people perceived attention to be, psychologists found that school teachers instructed their students to pay attention to an image by ‘holding the image still as one would with a camera.’ To concentrate, to pay attention, is viewed as a brow-furrowing exercise. Sit still, don't blink, and attend.” (Horowitz)

I have trouble paying attention. Not just from people not teaching me the “right way”, but from not hardly being enforced to pay attention at all. I was home-schooled by my mother, a musician who, from my perspective, seemed to prioritize the importance of spontaneity and creativity over seriousness and concentration, in the way she taught me and my siblings. This was good for many reasons, but also not-so-good in terms of my self discipline and focus. Due to this, I tend to drift between sometimes just “spacing out”, and most times paying sporadic bits of attention to various things all at once. Once this is combined with my obsessive need to perfect everything, or to do it “the right way”, I have always been known to take a longer time than most people doing things in general.

Although, in my general all over the place attention span, I tend to miss out on specifics or sometimes forget important things, I also sometimes pick up on strange details that other people tend to miss. Because of this, I have always been pretty convinced that I am very aware of my surroundings when I go walking (I tend to walk a lot, to get around and sometimes just to watch the sunset), much like the author. Although, since she states “Surely I had seen all that really mattered on the block. … I was consciously looking. What could I have missed? (¶) As it turns out, I was missing pretty much everything. After taking the walks described in this book, I would find myself at once alarmed, delighted, and humbled at the limitations of my ordinary looking. My consolation is that this deficiency of mine is quite human.” (Horowitz, 8) I am looking forward to doing this experiment myself, attempting to see more than what is usually evident to me. I feel like it will be fun, and maybe it will give me a different perspective on the world around me.